For his part, Mueller did not waver. Based on a personal review of the evidence, Mueller said he thought prosecutors could have proven beyond a jury's reasonable doubt that Ivins alone perpetrated the deadly mailings. Mueller also offered to privately provide the senators with additional technical details about the anthrax used in the mailings.
Ivins, 62, committed suicide July 29. His former lawyers have said they would have won his acquittal at a trial.
Another committee member, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), pressed Mueller on three fronts: the FBI's delay in examining access records showing Ivins' late nights and weekends spent in a special biocontainment lab, where he worked with anthrax; the FBI's misplaced focus from 2002 to 2006 on a former Army virologist, Steven J. Hatfill; and an outside review that Mueller announced this week, which is to focus only on the scientific analyses that traced anthrax from the mailings to Ivins.
Ivins worked as a biodefense scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md.
"There are many unanswered questions the FBI must address before the public can have confidence in the outcome of the case," Grassley said. He called for a "complete accounting of the FBI's evidence."
As for Hatfill, Grassley said, "Please explain how chasing an innocent man for four years was not a mistake." While Grassley spoke, Hatfill watched silently, with his attorney, from the visitors' section.
In response, Mueller said that although the FBI obtained early on the access records reflecting the movements of Ivins and other potential suspects, investigators did not analyze the data until years later, after genetic analyses of the anthrax spotlighted Ivins.
The $5.8-million settlement that the FBI and the Justice Department agreed in June to pay Hatfill was an acknowledgment, Mueller said, that investigative leaks "did harm his reputation. I abhor those leaks."
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david.willman@latimes.com
Times researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
